Buena Vista Seems Blinded by Son

I love Cuban music, care about cultural traditions and respect my elders as much as the next guy. But enough already with the hype over the Buena Vista Social Club, the cottage industry created around old musicians playing old music in an old way.

I don’t begrudge the success--the triumph, really--of the old-timers brought together for a 1996 recording session in Havana by American guitarist Ry Cooder. Their charm and unspoiled spirit come through even more convincingly in the documentary about the group, which I saw last week.

It’s refreshing that American audiences have taken to this sweet, romantic and conservative sound in an era of libidinous and aggressive excesses in pop. The total embrace of the project in the United States--including a Grammy and a Carnegie Hall concert--gives hope that the public will soon demand an end to the cruel and senseless U.S. embargo of Cuba.

Yet the commercial acceptance of the Buena Vista Social Club (BVSC) and its rather bland rendition of Cuban standards is really a marketing mind-boggler. In Cuba today, where creativity and innovation are the hallmark of popular dance music, people are scratching their heads over the strange workings of a market that rewards redundancy and lack of imagination.

Welcome to capitalism, where you don’t have to be the best to sell the most.

I’m not blaming Cooder, not entirely anyway. He’s spent his 35-year career exploring folksy forms of music, apparently unconcerned about commercialism. Even he was surprised by the smashing success of Buena Vista. “You never know what the public’s going to go for,” he said in the film. What I can’t forgive is the hyperbole and distortion that surround the selling of the recording and its spinoff albums, at least seven and counting. Here’s an example of BVSC propaganda taken from an interview with Cooder on the Internet:

“These people are the greatest artists in this style. . . . It’s like an experience you virtually can’t have. . . . Where are you going to hear this kind of music? . . . How are you going experience anything like it?”

Well, he could have come over to my house and listened to my Cuban music collection.

Where shall I start to tell you how much traditional Cuban music I have on my shelf? How about this: a double CD called “Septetos Cubanos, Sones de Cuba,” issued on Corason in Mexico City in 1990 and distributed in the United States by Rounder Records. The producers recorded nine son groups on location in places from Havana to Sancti Spiritus to Santiago.

Lo and behold, two of the songs, “Chan Chan” and “El Cuarto de Tula,” are among the tunes recorded by Buena Vista six years later. And guess what? In the earlier collection, they’re performed by none other than Eliades Ochoa, the cowboy guitarist on Cooder’s project.

“All over the island, as this collection reveals, exceptional bands are playing the old classics by composers like Matamoros and Corona as well as a repertoire of new sones that keep up the old spirit,” states Rounder’s Web page, where you’ll also find two recordings by Ochoa’s Cuarteto Patria from 1993 and 1995.

The truth is, older son musicians weren’t quite as neglected and forgotten as the Buena Vista mystique would have us believe. Want more proof?

I have another version of “Chan Chan,” this one recorded by Pablo Milanes, a contemporary Cuban singer-songwriter, at the Egrem studios in Havana where Cooder recorded Buena Vista. The Milanes CD, “Anos Vol. III,” was issued on his own label at least a year before Cooder & Co. showed up in Havana.

Now, guess who plays guitar with Milanes, one of the most beloved and respected figures in modern Cuban music? Bingo, it’s Compay Segundo, another of the oh-so-neglected musicians supposedly rescued from oblivion by Cooder and World Circuit, the London label behind Buena Vista. Segundo wrote two other songs on the fine Milanes album, which also includes “Y Tu Que Has Hecho,” another cut later recycled by Buena Vista.

I also own, or know of, three other recent versions of “Chan Chan” that predate Buena Vista. Least of these is the one by Compay Segundo himself, a plodding and plain rendition recorded at Egrem and available on a 1992 French compilation, “El Son Es Lo Mas Sublime.”

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One quiet BVSC member who isn’t highlighted much is Juan de Marcos Gonzalez, the project coordinator. What they don’t tell you is that Gonzalez has spent a quarter-century in Cuba recording (recently on World Circuit) traditional son music, the style born at the turn of the century and considered the starting point for modern salsa music.

Gonzalez is a founding member of Sierra Maestra, a group started in 1976 by students at the University of Havana that included Jesus Alemany, founder of Cubanismo, another modern band with a traditional focus.

Despite all this, Cooder still makes self-inflated statements about Buena Vista: “Let the world hear this [music] before it disappears.”

Get my drift? The BVSC phenomenon is a bit of a fraud. The public has swallowed the PR line that Cooder rescued a genre that was all but extinct. If it weren’t for him, you’d think Cubans would all soon be mourning the day their music died.

To be fair, son music is not very popular in Cuba today. I don’t doubt that these old musicians were not getting regular gigs. But there’s a good reason for that. The son is passe.

Cuba’s fabulous new bands wouldn’t dream of redoing traditional music like BVSC did, almost note for note and chord for chord. When they do old stuff, they make it fresh and modern.

In this country, we certainly don’t lament the fact that the Supremes aren’t touring anymore (are they?) or that Neil Sedaka doesn’t have a current recording contract (does he?). They had their day, and music moved on.

Before the BVSC session, pianist Ruben Gonzalez had not played piano in 10 years. He was 77 when he was discovered by Columbus, er, Cooder. But we’re not told that the exquisite stylist was part of a legendary series of recordings by Las Estrellas de Areito, made in Cuba in 1979 when Gonzalez was about 60. They’re now collector’s items, recently re-released by World Circuit. But unlike BVSC, that work showcases the power of mixing traditional and progressive elements in Cuban music and would mark a pinnacle for any musician’s career.

Let me leave you with a lyric from “Son al Son,” sung by Elena Burke with Orquesta Aragon on a 1990 Egrem compilation. “Aquel que dijo que al son le estaba llegando el fin / Ja! que no me vengan llorando cuando suene el cornetin.”

“To he who said that the son had come to an end / Ha! Don’t come crying to me when the trumpet sounds.”